January 14, 2011

Bowl TV Ratings Drop 9 Percent

Are there simply too many bowl games?

One could come to that conclusion because bowl TV ratings were down 9%, according to an analysis of Nielsen Media Research data by the Birmingham News. There were a record 35 games over 24 days and many of the games featured uncompetitive matchups. The average margin of victory was 15.3 points, the highest in a bowl season since 1997.

Twenty-three of the 33 returning bowls drew fewer viewers than a year ago. Among the 23 with a decline, 13 plummeted by 20% or more. The data is for 34 games. Nielsen did not have rating numbers for the TicketCity Bowl because the game was on ESPNU.

This was the first year of ESPN's four-year deal to broadcast all the Bowl Championship Series games and the move to cable impacted ratings. The five BCS games were down an average of 12% from last season and tied with 2007 for the BCS' lowest average rating in at least the past nine years. The move to cable cut off about 15 million homes that don't have cable or satellite.

There were ratings winners. The Outback Bowl featuring Florida and Penn State drew more than the Orange or Fiesta. The Insight Bowl, which was previously telecast by the NFL Network, moved to ESPN and saw a ratings spike of 460%.

Comments

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The Ticket City Bowl between Texas Tech and Northwestern was left out of the mix. It was, by far, the most entertaining of the four early Big Ten bowl blow-outs on January 1. I would like to see how it rated against some of the more established bowl games.

By the way, yes - there are too many bowl games. But as long as ESPN gets a 2.0 share or higher, it's profitable programming for them. ESPN doesn't care if the two teams are losing cash to the tune of over 6 figures for the priviledge of playing in the game.

ESPN's goal is to show advertisers a minimum 2.0 rating for many of these minor bowl games. Production costs are relatively cheap for broadcasting games and ESPN has evidently deemed the 2.0 rating as the threshold for recouping dollars charged for advertising versus their bottom line.

Ratings not a huge issue to ESPN. This from the Birmingham News story: "Unlike broadcast networks, whose model is based on advertising revenue, cable networks have dual revenue streams from advertising and subscription fees with cable and satellite operators."

ESPN may not care about ratings, but I'll double darn guarantee you that the advertisers do. They are the ones who are paying ESPN for the ads and if no one is watching the game, that means ESPN has to pay money back to the advertisers if the ratings go below a certain threshold. If ratings for some games continue to be low, ESPN won't be able to charge as much for ads and it could also make some advertisers shy away from any future considerations.

Dual revenue streams means advertising dollars are of the utmost importance to ESPN. They know how much they're getting on a monthly basis via subscription fees. Where ESPN makes their money on college football games is with advertising fees. It's a business gamble on the Mother Ship's part. You have a crappy bowl game that no one wants to watch, advertising revenue goes down. Plain and simple.